On 01/14/2012 09:14 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Since we're on this topic I can't stop picking - all in good fun I hope
- on Jonathan, the master of words. The following two sentences convey
the same exact information:
1.
There are certainly times when reducing how much "you" is used reduces
the
amount of text at no extra cost, but there are other times, when it's
far more
natural to use "you," and it can become harder to produce sentences
without
completely reworking that section of text if "you" is removed.
2.
Sure, it can reduce the word count, but I
really don't think that it does all that much to improve the quality
of the
text, and it can require quite a bit more work, since it tends to be
unnatural
to avoid "you" in the way that technical writers like to.
This pattern is quite frequent in Jonathan's posts. I trained myself to
skip the last sentence of each paragraph and often the last paragraph
entirely.
Andrei
In longer posts, I think the information is often laid out in an
approximately palindromic way.
